Posted 8:43 AM (0) comments

It's not a bug - it's a feature

Jeff Bohren, in commenting on my post about "Attention architects" thinks I've overlooked an element for our Digital ID World discussion:

Dave Kearns wants to get everyone together to talk it all out. Helpful, I suppose, but limited because of the absence of enterprise application vendors. Without application vendor buy in, identity management is going to continue to be a mess.

Not an oversight, Jeff, but planned that way. Too often the vendors dominate the conversation - and pay little attention to what the customer wants. True, they claim to listen and they claim that the next version includes those features "our customers have asked for," but we all know the real truth. The plan - and it isn't my plan, but was promulgated by Boeing's Marty Schleiff - is to develop sort of a consensus roadmap for how it should be done - what steps the enterprise identity architects think should happen and in what order. Vendors who can satisfy that roadmap will reap the reward. Vendors who ignore it will wind up in my "where are they now?" file.

Labels: architect, DIDW, enterprise